Galaxy and Bournville

Much like the Cadbury bar, this is a pure milk chocolate bar. It’s hefty and the little bite size chunks that break off are the perfect size for your mouth. The color is pretty and the smell is mostly of vanilla.

It’s very sweet, that’s the first thing I notice. However, the creamy melt is very smooth though a little sticky. The thing that I rejoiced in, though, is that there is no “powdered milk” flavor, which I associate with Cadbury chocolates. It’s too sweet for me, as the sugary notes overwhelm the milk and chocolate flavors, I found it to be very pleasant. It was pretty good with my coffee this morning.

As a solid dark chocolate bar, I was hoping for more chocolate. I didn’t read the package ahead of time so I was surprised to see now that the first ingredient on the label is sugar. Called “The Original Plain Chocolate” on the label, it is rather plain. Since it’s so sweet, the chocolate notes don’t really come out readily.

I was about four chunks into it before I started tasting the notes. It’s a very consistent cocoa flavor, hardly any trace of bitterness but some slight smoky, woodsy notes. The package says 39% cocoa mass, which probably explains my disappointment. I’m not saying it should be 70%, I’m just thinking that a little more cocoa butter and less sugar might make for a smoother bar with more flavor. As a mass market consumer bar it’s on par with the American Hershey’s Special Dark. Nothing fantastic but probably very dependable. Too bad it’s not even vegan, the ingredients list butterfat.

You might wonder why the bar is called Bournville - it’s where Cadbury put their first large production facility in the 1870s.

I knew someone whose husband headed up the Galaxy chocolate division around 10 years ago. I remember her saying that the reason Galaxy was so “creamy” was because they milled the cocoa finer than most other manufacturers.

I like Galaxy, but it is a very sweet chocolate. Galaxy combined with caramel is almost unbearable - it’s so sweet it sets your teeth on edge.

Its interesting you dont get a ‘powdered milk’ taste with these which you do with Cadburys- cadburys dont use powdered milk! they use only full cream milk from british (or irish in ireland)cows. galaxy on the other hand do use powdered milk as do nestle. Its a bit ironic that English chocolate is not classed as chocolate in america and that america claims to have more stringent guidelines. I recently tried some american chocolate and it was absolutely foul, and mainly full of nasties like hydrogenated vegetabe oil and artificial colours and flavours. English chocolate is world renowned to be some of the best in the world.

As I buy Nestle Aero bars at Kroger here in the US, when you find the weight of a British candy bar, they will be at the back- most often on a nutrition facts sticker to make sure that we can read it. And we don’t have a clue how to read the British label- except 46g- (wow they use metric for weighing candybars… well Britain please dont leave American in the dust… both us and y’all over there need to use traditional measures- not metric!)- which is 1.6oz. Peel the sticker supplied by sticker places in the US and you got a British Aero in America. As I said, in the UK, candy bar weight labels are at the back of the candy bar- not at the front as you’d expect in the US and Canada.

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